[thelist] html email (was: html dot syntax)

Joe Crawford joe at artlung.com
Tue Jul 31 18:09:04 CDT 2001


Brian King wrote:
> FYI, it's not just AOL users.  MS Outlook can also be set up to render
> HTML in your Email.  I personally use it.  I like getting email like
> that, (until some jerk figures out how to send me a virus with it).
> In short, I think there are more HTML enabled mail users out there than
> you assume.

I like mail that "goes both ways" - that will render in html, but also
will be readable in plaintext (particularly when I read mail in pine).
html bloats most messages unnecessarily anyway. In my experience, html
at least doubles message sizes - and for folks on modems or slow
connections - that's wasted time. Plaintext, while less sexy, is simply
more appropriate for most communications. There's a time and place for
HTML mail - and it's not very often.

Yes, this is opinion - but attachments and html and rich text are all on
a spectrum of potential troublemakers - especially for a public list.

Also, I remember a long time ago a guy sending a mail with a javascript
in it with an infinite loop alert in it. This worked in /netscape and
the only way to get out of it was to kill the browser/mailer. Deleting
it was a pain. It's a super-bad idea to enable scripting on incoming
email - as several notorious viruses have taught us.

<tip type="linkchecking with linklint">
linklint <http://www.linklint.org/> is one of a very few perfect pieces
of software around. By which I mean that it does what it sets out to do
with a minimum of fuss.

I have been using it since at least 1998 to wrangle the links in large
static html sites. The author, Jim Bowlin, has put the software under
the GNU GPL. Free, and free to modify. It's written in perl. If you do
unix it's a tremendous tool to do QA and testing on your sites.
Generates a spiffy report too - here's artlung.com. Looks like I got
some stuff to clean up. It doesn't do javascript based links, or
onclicks, or flash -- not sure if it handles CSS style references like:
url('page.image').

Worth a look.
</tip>

	- Joe
--
...........  Joe Crawford : thinking and design about the web
.... enigmatic narcissism and miscellany : http://artlung.com
.... community instigator : http://WebSanDiego.org
.... San Diego, California, USA .....................AAAFNRAA





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